We’ve officially released!  If you’ve been paying attention to the project, you might have noticed that there was a release on March 3, 2008.  I know a few of you have been paying attention because there were 58 downloads before we released the latest version:).  We held off on announcing the release because there was a last minute fix and we wanted to use MIX as a way to kick off the release.  If you aren’t familiar with the project, see my first post here.  The purpose of this project is to make the Virtual Earth developer experience better by fully enabling JavaScript Intellisense for the Virtual Earth Map Control inside of Visual Studio 2008.

I want to take a moment to thank the community for the HUGE outpouring of support for this project.  I announced the project on a Tuesday morning.  By then next day, we had 11 people volunteer to help develop the remaining pieces.  By Friday, we had our first release complete.  That is 4 days start to finish.  In reality, it was only 3 days since I spent most of the first day refactoring and setting up the project so multiple devs could work in parallel.  I am still in awe of how fast this release came together.  I never imagined we’d get a working solution in the hands of Virtual Earth developers so fast.  The credit goes to the community!  I coded VEMap & VEAltitudeMode.  Almost everything else was done by community devs.  Of the 11 devs on the project, there were really 4 folks who coded the majority of the classes & enumerations. 

Since we were able to able to get this project done so fast, it turns out we were able to use MIX as a way to create more awareness for the project.  Chris Pendleton used it in his Developing Applications with Microsoft Virtual Earth session.  You can watch his session, and all the other MIX sessions 24 hours after they happen at the conference at http://sessions.visitmix.com/. 

You can get the latest release straight from the codeplex project at https://www.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=VEJS&ReleaseId=11338.  Please download it, use it, and tell us how we can make it better through the codeplex project at http://www.codeplex.com/VEJS.  We already have a set of works items we are thinking about for the next release.  Let us know what we’re missing.

Unfortunately, there was a configuration snafu with the email address I gave out for you to request access to the project as a contributor.  If you you sent an email from a non Microsoft email address prior to this post, then you received a "Delivery Status Notification (Failure)" response.  I have fixed the problem, but it may take some time to replicate to all of our servers.  Please try again, if you still get a failure response, wait a day.  I assure you the email address is valid:).

I have completed refactoring source code project structure to enable better distribution of work across multiple contributors.  I’ve also created work items ready to be assigned to contributors.  So don’t be shy about contributing:).  The more contributors we have, the faster this turns into a useable solution for everyone! 

This will be the last time I blog from here about ongoing project issues.  All further project specific communications will be done via the codeplex project discussions tab.  I will, of course, make announcements about release on this blog:).

I will publish basic getting started instructions for contributors in the next day.  I will put the instructions on the discussions tab.

UPDATE: Fixed the embedded video.

Have you ever wished you could get JavaScript Intellisense for the Virtual Earth Map Control in Visual Studio 2008?  I have, so I came up with a solution and started a codeplex project!  I just recorded a short 10 minute channel 9 screencast explaining the solution.  The screencast is here.  I have also embedded the video in this post for those of you who prefer that.  Once the video has started, you can double click it to go fullscreen.

The project is not finished.  I need people to volunteer to contribute so we can release full intellisense for the Virtual Earth Map Control 6.0.  Instructions for people who want to contribute are in the screencast.  The more people willing to contribute, the faster we make this available for everyone!

The codeplex project is http://codeplex.com/vejs.

https://channel9.msdn.com/EmbedVideo.aspx?PostID=386000&Silverlight=true